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Development, University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Department of Anthropology Papers Department of Anthropology 9-1-2005 Development, "Culture," and the Promise of Modern Progress Deborah A. Thomas University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.upenn.edu/anthro_papers Part of the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Thomas, D. A. (2005). Development, "Culture," and the Promise of Modern Progress. Social and Economic Studies, 54 (3), 97-125. Retrieved from http://repository.upenn.edu/anthro_papers/57 Special Issue on Sir Arthur Lewis, Part I. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/anthro_papers/57 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Development, "Culture," and the Promise of Modern Progress Abstract This essay investigates the key tensions that arise within Jamaica's new cultural policy "Toward Jamaica the Cultural Superstate." The ra gument presented in the paper is that "culture" is a tricky and potentially dangerous site upon which to hinge national development goals, even though the expansion of cultural industries may well represent a viable and potentially lucrative strategy for economic development. This is because invariably, "culture" cannot do the work policy makers would like it to do, and its invocation within policy spheres usually already signals a kind of developmental distress, a perceived need for retooling through a form of social engineering. In other words, "culture" (in the anthropological sense) reflects and shapes, yet cannot in and of itself solve the most pressing challenges facing Jamaica today. Disciplines Social and Cultural Anthropology Comments Special Issue on Sir Arthur Lewis, Part I. This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/anthro_papers/57 Social and Economic Studies 54:3 (2005): 97-125 ISSN: 0037-7651 DEVELOPMENT, "CULTURE," AND THE PROMISE CF MODERN PROGRESS DEBORAH A. THOMAS" ABSTRACT This essay investigates the key tensions that arise within Jamaica's new cultural policy "Toward Jamaica the Cultural Superstate." The argument presented in the paper is that "culture" is a tricky and potentially dangerous site upon which to hinge national development goals, even though the expansion of cultural industries may well represent a viable and potentially lucrative strategy for economic development. This is because invariably, "culture" cannot do the work policy makers would like it to do, and its invocation within policy spheres usually already signals a kind of developmental distress, a perceived need for retooling through a form of social engineering. In other words, "culture" (in the anthro­ pological sense) re.fleets and shapes, yet cannot in and of itself solve the most pressing challenges facing Jamaica today. In thinking through the links between cultural development and economic growth, we are confronted with a constant tension: culture as a set of symbolic goods vs. culture as a "way of life." Attempts to institutionalize these links entrench us within another tension, that between cultural policy for economic development and cultural policy for social development. While the latter raises issues related to the preservation of national, regional, and local cultures as foundations for community identities, the former interrogates processes of modernization (and currently, globaliza­ tion). Both directions are undergirded by a series of assumptions about the relationships between states and citizens, between leaders and "ordinary people," and between values and economic productivity. In this essay, I want to explore some of these "' This essay has benefited from the critical commentary of several individuals including Patricia Northover, Annie Paul, Sonjah Stanley-Niaah and the anonymous readers for Social and Economic Studies. I am also indebted to Pat Northover for inviting me to present a version of this essay at the 6th Annual Conference of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, 17- 18 March 2005, and to my fellow panelists Michaeline Crichlow and Pat Northover, Percy Hintzen, Sidney Bartley, discussant Sonjah Stanley-Niaah, and several students in the audience for the rigourous and thoughtful discussion that ensued. 98 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES assumptions by thinking through the ways culture becomes mobilized through policy as an instrument of governance. To do this, and to raise questions about the act of cultural policy-making more generally, I will offer a critical ethnographic reading of Jamaica's new cultural policy, "Toward Jamaica the Cultural Superstate." Ultimately, I will argue that "culture" is a tricky and potentially dangerous site upon which to hinge national development goals, even though the expansion of cultural industries may well represent a viable and potentially lucrative strategy for economic development. This is because invariably, "culture" cannot do the work policy-makers would like it to do, and its invocation within policy spheres usually already signals a kind of developmental distress, a perceived need for retooling through a form of social engineering. In other words, while "culture" (in the anthropological sense) reflects and shapes the worldviews and institutional arrangements of this (or any) society, it cannot in and of itself solve society's most pressing challenges. That is, if we understand "culture" to be the totality of what people do, and not as some sphere of life that is separate from others, then we must understand it as ever-evolving based on changing experiences and contexts. "Soft Power" and Cultural Governance Foucault's notions of governmentality and biopower represent a rethinking of power as a field of multiple forces. In this view, the state is a contradictory ensemble of practices and processes of governance that manage both the subjugation of populations and the elaboration of subjectivities by naturalizing the arbitrary (1991, 2003). For Foucault, governance is not only enacted in the juridical realm of law and policy, but also through the various institutions that discipline populations to have particular understandings of belonging and deviance, and in so doing, to accept the social hierarchies that shape those understandings (see also Bourdieu 1984, 1998). Like Gramsci, Foucault is interested in the cultural dimensions of power - its unmaking and remaking - but he does not see civil society as distinct from political society. In other words, where Gramsci locates counter-hegemony within the public sphere of intellectual and (to some extent) popular artistic production, Foucault sees the power of the state as "capillary" (1979). For Foucault, there is no "outside," as the process of governance always shapes even the parameters of the imagination. Yet while the art of governmentality creates a particular configuration of possibilities, Development, "Culture: 99 subjects also work within this configuration to reshape it according to their own agendas. Thus, there is a sense of dynamism in relation to socio-political fields, within which actors at various levels both reproduce and re-produce relations of power, not only institu­ tionally but also informally. One of the ways that states become social actors in everyday life is through the establishment of national cultural narratives. That states "have actively engaged in the production of national fantasies of communitas" (Aretzaga 2003: 396) is amply demonstrated by the plethora of anthropological and historical studies of cultural policies, and the concomitant literature on cultural politics and cultural struggles.2 As an aspect of governance, cultural policy formulation embodies a form of social engineering because it creates blueprints for the generation of ideal citizens. Within Europe and the United States, cultural policy formulation has often been viewed as legitimating social hierarchies through metaphors of "distinction" or "taste" (Bourdieu 1984). However, within postcolonial contexts there has been a sense that cultural policy-making is a form of counter-hegemonic practice geared toward reorienting national sensibilities away from European colonial aesthetic hierarchies toward a valuation of that which is seen to be indigenously generated. This has especially been the case for states that have maintained complex political ties to empire during the post-colonial period (e.g. Puerto Rico, see Davila 1997), but is also a more general phenomenon in which newly­ independent states are faced with the prospect of defining cultural difference while maintaining significant political and economic connections. From the point of view of state officials, the emphasis here is on modernization with a difference. But citizens, of course, enact their own visions of cultural modernity both through and beyond the spaces made available to them by policy-makers. Virginia Dominguez (1992) has evocatively suggested that the whole enterprise of post-colonial cultural policy development is not, as it has generally been perceived, a counter-hegemonic act. Instead it represents a continuation of a form of European ideological hegemony that positions "culture" as a sphere of life separate from other spheres such as political organization, economic production, and technological innovation about which one might also formulate policies. This separation, she argues, is 2 The literature on national cultures and cultural politics is too vast to list here, but for review essays, see Alonso
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